​Barber's scholarship centers on the study of gender, culture, and organizations. Specifically, she look at how individuals interact with organizational cultures to rethink or reproduce structural privileges on the ground through work and consumption, protest, and disaster management. With an intersectional focus that includes race, class, and sexuality, Barber's research highlights the durability of multiple inequalities with an eye towards those circumstances in which arise moments of resistance.

In Styling Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Inequality in the Men’s Grooming Industry (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Barber investigates the "new man" as a

theorizes the “labor of consumption” to explain the emergence of a new multi-billion dollar consumer niche, the men’s U.S. grooming market. Taking high-end men’s salons as a case study, she discuss both the role women service workers play as cultural brokers for well-to-do, heterosexual white men and the political potential of spaces in which people cross potentially stigmatizing boundaries of gendered behavior. The labor of consumption generates processes that are building-blocks of social structures; so although salon clients may be labeled progressive “new men,” the organization of labor actually bolster’s their white privilege and heteromasculine identities in ways that are particularly salient in today’s political environment

which looks at the politics of the men’s grooming industry. In particular, I will discuss how structures of inequality are perpetuated through both formal and informal work requirements at high-end men’s salons. The “new man” appears to embody shifts in gender relations. evidence of growing gender equity in a way that feminists can celebrate. Because the “new man” suggests shifts toward equality in gender relations, it becomes important to ask: under what circumstances does the “new man” arise? If he is indeed a beacon of feminist hope, then we need to know what circumstances make him possible so that we can reproduce them. To determine the effects of the “new man” on gender relations, we need to ask: How does the (concept of the) “new man” shape interactions between people on the ground? Also: Do places in which the new man is institutionalized indeed focus on white masculinity? If so, what might this mean for the limits of the “new man”? If the “new man” crosses gender boundaries, then the men’s grooming market serves as an ideal field site. Studying men’s grooming can help us see just how the “new man” is 1) an institutionalized cultural ideal and 2) a product of interpersonal interactions, and more specifically a product of labor.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

Kristen Barber. Forthcoming. “The Labor of Consumption in Men’s Grooming—Or—What Does it Take toMake Men Beautiful?” In Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment, edited by Natalie Boero and Kate Mason. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Kelsy Kretschmer and Kristen Barber. 2018. “The ‘Man Question’ in Feminism.” In Nevertheless They Persisted: Feminisms and Continued Resistance in the U.S. Women's Movement, edit by Jo Reger. London, U.K.: Routledge.

Chelsea Johnson and Kristen Barber. 2018. “The Gender and Sexual Politics of Hair,” In A Cultural History of Hair in the Modern Age, edited by Geraldine Biddle-Perry. London, U.K.: Bloomsbury Publishing.